Toulouse! Toulouse! My Lautrec Fantasy

 

So my Lautrec Trek continues. Sometimes I think I'm over it (my God, this is like a bad breakup!), and at other times I think it has just begun.

One thing that has kept it going is a novel I'm reading by Pierre LaMure, called, strangely enough, Moulin Rouge. It purports to be the novel on which the 1952 movie is based, but so far it bears little or no relation to that much-loved (by me, not by art critics, who loathe it) film, one of those old-friend movies you like to spend some time with, even if you know how it ends. 

 The novel is interesting for the way it DOESN'T truly represent Lautrec, the silly boy behind the gloomy tortured artist, the young wag who dressed up as a clown, an Arab sheik, and a fancy lady in a feather boa, just because he liked having his picture taken. The Julia Frey bio, as bogged down as it is by unnecessary detail, does seem to capture lightning in a bottle, the mercurial, multi-faceted genius who really could go out on the town and have a good time. While at the same time, not whitewashing the fact that he died of a combination of alcoholism and tertiary syphilis.

Though the  novel tries to paint him as so chronically lonely as to be almost friendless, the truth is he had a host of loyal and even loving friends, who tried to protect him from  the nastiness of social stigma. I think they really did see the value of what they had in Henri, a little man with a huge heart, and an incandescence of vision that would all too quickly flame out.

The Pierre LaMure novel, though I was not able to get much information on it (it seems to be out  of print and only available in used copies), is plainly a transation from the French. Though it has touches of brilliance (such as describing a grand piano  as "like a coffin for a harp") there's a clunky quality to it, a labored, almost wheezy sense of trudging through detail. French is essentially untranslatable, and the English language, though it 's good for technical things, is lousy for  expressing  nuance. Only the most brilliant poets can make it jump  through hoops of fire and do pyrotechnic tricks. Whoever translated LaMure's novel, and I still can't find out who, lacked that kind of genius and just went word-for-word, making it a bit of a trudge.

SO: we're left with the paintings, and the drawings, the lithographs, the posters, the immediacy, the startling sense of catching his subjects in mid-breath, as if they are about to turn and speak to you. He not only captured these vulnerable nanoseconds, he captured what they weren't even expressing on their faces or body postures. He got inside them. The little man, no doubt stigmatized for looking so odd, always with thick pince-nez clamped on to his face because he could barely see, saw things in ordinary human beings that no  one has ever perceived before or since.

Can I tell you my Lautrec fantasy? Will you be suprised it has nothing at all to do with night life, absinthe, sex in general? I know a little bit of French, what we Canadians call "cereal box French" (meaning, a degree of familiarity due to the bilingual packaging of products), and Lautrec knew a little bit of English and liked to try to speak it. He dressed like a dapper Englishman, albeit one with sawed-off legs, and his mother even called him Henry. 

My fantasy is that we're trying to have a conversation, and it's not going well, in spite of the fact that it's totally hilarious and I'm having to sing most of my responses ("Sur le pont, d'Avignon, on y danse, on y danse"). This slightly hysterical exchange is no doubt oiled by Lautrec's famous cocktail, called the Earthquake, consisting of  one part absinthe and one part oblivion. As a retired drinker, I don't think I'd really need it to feel the effect.

I want to talk to a man who did the impossible every day of his life. He didn't just paint movement, he painted intent, and even things people had not dared to think in their conscious minds. His paintings are bristling with aggressive and even ugly phallic symbols, demonstrating the fact that men didn't impress him  very much, but the women - . His  tender studies of courtesans embracing, kssing and cuddling in bed are full of a compassion no one else ever thought of, much less expressed. Compassion, for these harlots? And Lesbians, to boot! 

So he knew about contempt, and how easily and casually you could become the target of it if you did not quite fit the social prisons of the day. He saw and saw and saw, mainly how people somehow found love and expressed love in the midst of an ugly, harsh, unyielding environment where everything was for sale. Much as he was famous in his lifetime, he may even have craved anonymity, turning back the clock to simpler times when not so  much was expected of him. 

This is his most famous poster, the one that started it all, and as usual it's topsy-turvy, forcing us to look over the shoulder of this great hulking monster in the foreground to get a glimpse of  the wild cancan dancer La Goulue, the real subject of the work. As a backdrop we see black silhouettes of high hats both male and female, and on the left is a wildly distorted electric light.

And that's another thing. Lautrec was the first artist to paint electricity - that garish new phenomenon that revealed things  we never expected to see. Suddenly the soft gaslight was wiped out,  the newfangled illumination exploding like lightning in a way that must have seemed like a violation.  It's why the grotesque carved-from-chocolate man in the foreground is in shadow, and only the dancer in the middle is lit up, scandalously displaying her crotch to all and sundry. Her lower half lights up the room, electric lamps making her lacy plus-fours flare and glare.  Did any artist of his day dare to display a massive phallic hand just inches away from a nearly-bared female crotch?

The fact that it's beautiful is another mystery, another impossibility, like that wacky Franglish conversation I want to have with Henri. He was gone too soon, but while he was here - while he was here - 

How many phallic symbols can you cram into one painting??

 

I just don't want to let go of my little friend, just yet. Maybe it's just a distraction from the myriad ongoing health "issues"  that may yet do  me in. The shadow of mortality is never far away, and I honestly wonder how much time I have left. And reading about the man's untimely demise wasn't exactly uplifting. BUT! I still uncover surprises, like this famous poster of Jane Avril sitting ringside in a cabaret with a withered-up old geezer beside her.

Freud could have used this to prove his most notorious theory. There are the obvious ones - the heads of the cellos and bass fiddles in the background;  the arms of the orchestra conductor; his "erect" stick;  the odd little thing like a whale on the left (one of  those inexplicable little figures he always draws in the corners); the old man's cane; the back of Jane's chair; whatever she is holding in her hand - a fan, perhaps? The black gloves of the lady in the background; the riotous "thing" on top of Jane's hat, like a phallus exploding. . . and there are probably more.  Lautrec had a devilish sense of humor, and was not averse to drawing penises all over the place, especially in the sexually-charged atmosphere of the Belle Epoque (also known as the fin de siecle, a darker, more shadowy title revealing the not-so-Belle Epoque's underside). 

I'm still finding more. What is that thing in the bottom right corner? The old man's leg or something? And what's going on with his beard? It seems to blend into some sort of foamy-looking thing. a cravat of some kind. The man's hand on the cane might qualify, though here we risk seeing the entire painting (actually it was a poster, one of his more famous ones) as one big weenie-fest. 

In fact, Jane Avril herself, all decked out in black, her sinuous figure curving upward in a familiar pattern - maybe she's the ultimate phallic symbol. There was lots of sex going on in those days, but I  doubt if there was very much intimacy. It's implied in the  biographies that the sex workers he hired were treating him like social work, an act of mercy for a man who likely would have had a problem attracting a civilian mate. And it was virtually a certainty that he would never marry, a terrible crisis in an aristocratic family like the Lautrecs, where marriages were ways of consolidating wealth and spewing out the next generation of grossly-inbred male heirs. Disabilities were seen very differently then, and his truncated stature and strange, Habsburg-looking facial features might have made fine ladies not want to be seen with him.

But those eyes. Those eyes. I don't even need to say it.

The truth is, they lost out. Imagine knowing a genius like Lautrec! What a mind, and beyond his incandescent talent, something almost supernatural in the energy, the supercharged sexuality, but at the same time, the curious detachment of the world he created and reflected. As his biographer Julia Frey put it: "Everything was for sale." Not just  the women, but the paintings, the posters, the lithographs, all the brilliant work he did in 36 years - all of it had a price on it. HE was for sale, and he knew it, which is partly why he posed for all those droll photographs, purposely making himself look  silly and even trite. He seemed to be saying: I don't take this life seriously, no, not at all! Come to the Cabaret, old chum. Step right up. Step inside, breathe the air, the smoke, the opium, the absinthe, the greasepaint and sweat and cheap  perfume, and even darker things. He painted the air and the anxiety and the drenching, self-annihilating pleasures that were all too brief in their analgesic effect.  

All of it cost him. All of it was for sale.

POSTSCRIPT! I don' t know if I dare post this to Facebook, as it's a family show, after all, and those terrible weenie references may corrupt the youth of this country, if not the world. But I had to include a cute little detail that is also relevant:

Toulouse-Lautrec was nicknamed "The Coffee Pot" by his friends, particularly the women of Montmartre, due to his short stature and the disproportionately small size of his legs compared to the rest of his body. He himself reportedly referred to himself as "a small coffee pot with a big spout," embracing the nickname with his characteristic irony and humor. The nickname also reflected his lively personality and popularity as a lover. 

Strangely enough, as detailed as the Julia Frey bio was (sometimes excruciatingly so), no mention was ever made of his famous/infamous nickname. Could it be that those ladies of the night did not feel sorry for him at all, but really DID celebrate him, not as an oddity or a random genius, but as a well-endowed lover? He could be surprisingly earthy, preferring red-haired women because he claimed their natural scent attracted him. And I don't mean Chanel No. 5, folks.

This is a little sad, but I had to post it anyway. . .

 

So while digging around in Lautrec Land, I found this, a rather sad diagram (in Spanish) listing all the disabilities Lautrec had. It's called Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, which may not exist, and as far as I can see his problems were genetic, the result of generations of aristocratic inbreeding. It's an ugly topic, as it verges on incest in too many ways, and the most horrendous example is what happened to the Habsburgs, who inbred their way to a screeching halt with the freakish Charles II of Spain.

But Toulouse had a more charming persona - well, yes, he WAS charming, the too-long overcoat, the dapper hat and walking stick and the legs that were half the length one would expect. He looks kind of like a doll, a puppet, a child-man. This was a sort of semi-fictional character he deliberately cultivated, so that he became a kind of mascot for the avant-garde. 

So what went on inside hm? A lot of it is in the paintings. But even more of it is evidenced in the way he lived. Not too unusual for a bohemian of his time, but all the absinthe and the cognac and all the rest of it finally and inevitably did him in. No  doubt this came at a much younger age due to all his disabilities, visible or internal. Not to mention that other creepy affliction: syphilis, which was totally untreatable then and which anyone who went to prostitutes could not help but end up with. 

It was a short life, a hard life, but what a life! The Julia Frey biography emphasizes that his life was NOT one big misery - he was a Goodtime Charlie (or Charlot) who really did know how to enjoy himself. He had a host of friends, good and loyal friends who truly loved and took care of him (though they were unable to stop or even regulate the drinking which eventually killed him). 

It wasn't all hell and suffering and wretchedness. He actually made a good living selling his work in many forms. He was never even remotely a starving artist, for even if the paintings and lithographs  weren't selling, his mother provided him  with a comfortable allowance to live on (not unlike Van Gogh with his brother Theo). The sad thing is that he never really had an intimate relationship with a woman that wasn't casual or short-lived (usually a business transaction). In the movie Moulin Rouge, a woman does try to love him, but he is too encased in his bitterness to allow her to penetrate his hard shell.

Did this happen? We don't know. We know he suffered, but he also rejoiced, posed for wacky pictures, played pranks, sang drinking songs, went to bed with tarts, and generally whooped it up. 

NOW I know what's on his head!

 

But I have even less idea what it means! This is one of the many costumes Lautrec liked to don for photographs. He never smiles, which is sort of disappointing, but he may have been self-conscious about his teeth. Like so many of the great artistes of his time, he had syphilis (and that includes Beethoven and Van Gogh, among others), which of course was untreatable. But one of the things the disease does is rot your teeth. I'm sorry to be such a bearer of bad news, but it's true. The Julia Frey bio I'm slogging through (and yes, it IS a hard slog in places, being almost more detailed than you would ever want) presents him as whole as she can, the bright and the dark, including his sexual escapades with prostitutes and the resulting incurable disease. 

He's in some sort of "Oriental" getup, perhaps supposed to be Japanese (which was all the rage with the artistes of the time, including Van Gogh), but why is he holding that creepy-looking doll? The fan seems to indicate orientalisme, if that's what it's called. But I still don't know what that thing on his head is supposed to signify. It  looks phallic (and no other artist ever crammed so many phallic symbols into his work), and oddly like someone sticking their tongue out, or perhaps raising a middle finger. I'm not sure if that particular hand-gesture existed back then. 

In other famous Lautrec poses, he looks cross-eyed, and in some he is plainly in drag. Then there is the most notorious photo of all (or should I say, series of photos, which may have been meant to be put together Muybridge-style to make a primitive animation), where he is taking  a dump on the beach. No, I won't subject you to THAT one!

 But, I have discovered a new trove of Lautrec images on Microsoft Bing. No one uses Microsoft Bing, and I barely knew it existed until I wanted to look up Monmon Cats and found a trove of them there. Really, it's a much better setup than the Google images which have completely overtaken anything else. 

I could get even MORE lost in Lautrec at this rate. Whether it's good for me or not remains to be seen. These obsessions were what Lautrec liked to call furias, passions that took on the intensity of rage - "all the rage", as the saying goes. 

I have furias too, but they never make me world-famous, or cause anyone to even look at my work.  I was amused to hear that the Lautrec family were Anglophiles, meaning - for some weird reason - they loved all things English. It's partly why Lautrec dressed that way. Why? I still haven't figured it out. The dry dullness of the British, preferred to the poetic, exotic French?

 But between his broken English and my fractured French, we might have been able to carry on some kind of conversation.

Afterthought: I came across this rather sad photo of Henri while in his cups, or passed out. 

Toulouse! Toulouse! Even More Lost in Lautrec

 

Or maybe I'm just lost. My only consolation, these days, is how I can still lose myself in the creative process, whether anyone else sees it or not - which they likely won't. 

 But I LOVE this poster! It's an illustration  for that series Waldemar did (I won't even try to spell his last name), which I had mixed feelings about. He seemed to be giving Henri the once-over, and surely he deserved better than that. Besides, he hated Jose Ferrer in Moulin Rouge, making me wonder if he ever actually watched it.

One of my many favorite photo portraits of Henri. He always wears such an enigmatic expression  and never smiles, though this clashes with everything I'm reading about his hysterical nocturnal revels and the way he loved to roll around with all those women he so accurately portrayed. Here he looks serious, as if striking a pose, and no doubt this is one of his many costumes (what's that thing on his head??). But there is also something tragic in his eyes. Or is it the alcohol? No one knows better than I what it can do to a soul, the corrosive effects of what is supposed to be a pleasure.

This painting has the strange title of Poudre de Riz (Rice Powder), so named after the chalky mask this woman is forced to wear to attract customers. Though the woman is obviously young, not much more than  a girl, there is nothing young about her facial expression, the tough, jaded look that has so much vulnerability and sorrow behind it. No one starts off in life planning to be a prostitute. nor did  Henri decide to be a dwarf and an alcoholic. One must make the best of it, mon cheri.

I laughed out loud when I realized that this is a portrait of Oscar Wilde! Yes, he has captured the man, though in the most cartoonish way possible. The dissipated look with the drooping eyes, the bee-stung lips, the massive body in powder-blue velvet. . . yes, that's Oscar, all right. The two knew each other, and no doubt Henri realized that Wilde was yet another stigmatized soul who would pay dearly just for being himself.

I  LOVE finding more candid shots of Henri! This one is a treasure. Think of  being the anonymous, scruffy-looking character sitting on the park bench next to one of the greatest geniuses of the art world. Wonder what they're saying to each other? Is it happy hour yet? Is it wine o'clock? At any rate, it was always happy hour chez Lautrec. Though I refuse to believe the man was ever happy.

I love how this captures the hard work, sweat and exhaustion behind the most delicate ballet performances. She has plopped down for a second, huffing anf puffing, probably craving a cigarette or a drink, or both. But all the audience ever sees is the delicate illusion. Lautrec was never satisfied with that. As usual, the image seems to have been captured in mid-breath, so you can practically hear her speaking. You are there - always, but it's not always comfortable.

I don't even know who  this  is, but it's an example of why some people loathed his art. They were afraid they'd show up in it somewhere. The woman in the background seems to be someone I knew once, or saw in a dream, or a nightmare - or did I just hear her voice? Lautrec was one of the first artists to paint artificial light, the glaring electric lamps and spotlights in the cabarets making every color look garish, with a gloom in the background in  which things seem to be crouched and coiled.

I love the brothel paintings, the way he portrays tenderness and affection between women who must be tough and hard-boiled to survive their lives. It has been said that these are the only works in which Lautrec shows human beings displaying any tenderness to each other. But it also reveals that there is a world of women which is absolutely NOT dependent on the favors of men. Did Lautrec feel shut out of this world, or did his art provide him with a magic key?

I don't know who this is either, but she is electrifying! The face, the eyes - I  don't know, I can't get out of this thing I've fallen into, this tub of love, this gay Purr-ee that I now know was anything but gay, except maybe in the sexual sense. How can mere paint bring someone alive like this? And why can't I do it? Stick to what you know. Keep writing, even if it kills you. Even if NO ONE is listening and no one even knows you are there. Which is probably true. Everyone noticed Henri, and rightly so, even though he flamed out well before the age of 40. But can you imagine Lautrec old? Or anything else other than what he was - a total original?

Toulouse-Lautrec: zoom in

 

Zoom in, zoom out. Of course nothing like this could be accomplished in the era in which this was painted. But perhaps with our painterly eye (borrowed, of course, because we really don't have one), we can see it, the way we're sucked in, drawn in by the vacuum of her eyes (as Dylan would put it), so that we perceive what is truly at the heart of this painting.

The first thing I noticed were those fierce, angry eyes, dark-ringed, with arched, almost Satanic eyebrows and a curving mouth that seems almost an inversion of the brows. This was a tough, harsh lady of the night (and it might even be La Goulue, the Glutton, though I haven't researched it enough to know for sure). 

Then as you zoom in, you see more. In the head-and-shoulders shot, she suddenly looks different, more elegant, even graceful. The white skin contrasted with the black ruff is startling. The tendrils of her hair, the delicate feathers surrounding her neck, somehow bring out another quality altogether. She is not so armor-plated now, and the fierce, angry eyes seem just a bit sadder. She is tired, perhaps hung over, but needs to get it together for one more night of business.

Then when her face fills the frame, we see the vulnerability. She is weary under the hard mask, that mask which Toulouse has stripped away, ruthlessly, yet somehow compassionately. Softened, she looks almost embarrassed, as if she really would rather be somewhere else - or just maybe, someone else. You can also see a younger version of herself, a softer face, a little girl who went the wrong  way and now is lost.

And then in the final shot, you can see the despair, the grief, the trapped feeling. Though the upward pencil-strokes of her brows and lower lids are more masklike than before, the ruse has become transparent through Lautrec's magic x-ray. She is jaded, exhausted, but also - afraid? Yes, it's there somehow, impossible, a multilayered effect which only a genius could accomplish. Her right eye stares at us, a glazed bullseye, but the left eye  looks as if she is ready to cry. The hard line of her brow is parallel to the drawn-on half-circle which almost looks like a black eye.

We were never meant to see it like this, but if you flip it over, the eyes look terrified, like someone who is about to scream in horror. It's ghoulish, but brilliant, like a clown burning in hell. Is this somehow there even though it's not there, unseeable except through an artificial trick, a zooming in which just reveals more and more with every shot?

 Quelle horreure!

AFTERNOTE. This isn't La Goulue, not specifically anyway, though he may have had her pose for it. It's called Woman in Black Boa, and in the first shot her long, thick feather boa gives her a shaggy, animalistic look, as if she has fur. The pointed, straight-down black strokes give the whole painting a downward pull, and look kind of like furious rain on a dark night. There is a curious circular stroke around her right arm, as if she has just brought her hand sharply down, or perhaps whirled around to face us, and not very happily: "What do you want?"  Lautrec captured that element of surprise like nobody else. 

Lautrec, Lautrec - I know you too well

  

One of my favorite images of Lautrec. Labelled as a "trick photo", I actually think he was magical enough to split himself in two and portray himself. the Two Henris. both spectator and subject. 

I love the intent way he studies himself, pencil poised, and the slightly aw-shucks fake modesty of his subject. probably imitating every falsely coy nude model he ever paid to pose. As usual, his face is full of elegance and sly wit, but  still, essentially, unreadable.

What's coming across in the Julia Frey bio is his humor, which has been downplayed in favor of the tortured artist in just about every book, movie or bio I've ever seen. Of course he suffered - Frey does say his close friends felt they were helplessly watching as he drank himself to death. unable to do anything to stop him. 

He was in constant physical pain from the bone disease that caused his legs to crumble, and the host of other internal ailments brought on by generations of inbreeding (the noble Toulouse-Lautrec family tree twisted inward rather than branching out, kind of like the Hapsburgs), and the only way he ever found to cope with the pain was to drink. And that's not even to mention the psychic pain of knowing that he was a constant disappointment to his snobbish family, who didn't have to hustle artwork (and such artwork!) to make a living. 

So he WAS two Lautrecs, at least - the wealthy aristocrat, who never needed to work and who only visited those dives as a form of slightly contemptuous recreation, and the almost skinless artist melding into those heartbreaking brothel scenes, becoming one with the cabaret acts (the little man in the corner scribbling on a napkin, which is actualy what he did, not just something in the movie), stripping off the masks, holding up what seems like an actual camera lens to capture the swish of skirts and the bloodthirsty screams of the dancers as they fell violently into a row of splits.

I'm not trying to make this "good", in fact I can barely write it at all, and though I have posted the last few entries on Facebook, I  really don't know why. No one reads this blog any more and I know it, so why do I even do it? And I am even more certain that nobody bothers with my Facebook entries, except for the odd one that is utterly trivial. It says more about them than me, and I know it, but it still hurts. Has this all been in vain?

I  suppose I do this as a distraction. The writing game has revealed itself to be even more mercenary and heartless than I thought. Everybody's hustling. Everything is for sale. If it's no sale, you don't exist any more, as it is almost entirely a popularity contest, even worse than the living hell I went through in high school.

And I've had enough of that.  

I don't know what the future will bring, and maybe it's nothing  -  I am contemplating, literally, not existing any more. Oh, I want to be optimistic, but I'm not. Like Henri, I know my time is  short and  growing shorter (and oh, those awful puns  - but I still think, with his sardonic wit, he'd appreciate it). And oh yes, with each day we live, all of us, our  tally of days grows shorter and shorter (and why should I become more patient as I  grow older? Wouldn't the opposite make more sense?) 

But who wants to know? As the song says, the game of life is hard to play -  I'm going to lose it anyway. So if writing is communication, I'm not sure I'm communicating at all any more. Henri never needed to worry about selling his work - his magnificent posters were the  kind of advertising no other painter had ever known before, and people tore them off doorways and walls, perhaps knowing they had something of real value. 

But here he is, Lautrec painting Lautrec, as if nobody else notices him, so he must portray himself. 

It could be argued that every  painter paints themselves - just look  at our old buddy Vincent, and the more modern Frida Kahlo - but few were actually able to photograph themselves doing it. Oh, you want a self-portrait? Well, here I am painting myself! Will I get the details right?  No doubt someone will say he does not. The more some people talk, the less they say. But did he give a shit? Yes and no. The bon vivant surface (usually drunk) hid a desperately broken heart which peeps through in some of his photos.

In my Facebook post, I  compared Lautrec to Chaplin's Little Tramp. Though no doubt someone will say it's an absurd comparison and that Chaplin knew nothing about Lautrec, I still think it's a worthy insight. (And I'm glad somebody does, because let's face it, nobody else will care enough to find out.)

They were both portraying little men, marginalized, slightly shabby and down-at-heels, but still somehow elegant, with the bowler hat, the cane, the natty suitcoat which had seen better days. Even the waddly, awkward, ducklike walk. Chaplin was feisty and unquenchable, and though Toulouse could not manage the physical feats, his wit and playfulness and practical jokes were incredibly courageous, as he was finding a way to  defend himself, to take a stand, even to have adventures among the avant-garde who adopted him as a sort of mascot. 

It was hard for him, not so much to love as to be loved, and as I lay there on the pullout bed in more pain than I thought I would  ever experience, I truly believed in my soul that no one had ever cared about me at all. In all my days, I had never once been truly loved, though I had lavished love on everyone around me for decades.

 Worse, no one even noticed. 

That wounded, devastated child who never should have been born, the late-in-life embarrassment (for they truly did NOT want another baby, and my mother even told me straight-out that she wanted an abortion but her doctor talked her out of it), the disappointment, the one who did not add anything to the family's prestige, who didn't even have a university degree and wrote novels that nobody read - . Oh yes. At the core, we are one.

Lost in Lautrec: why Jose Ferrer was the best Toulouse

I watched the movie long before I knew very much about the man. But as with that other painter-of-the-people, Van Gogh, Lautrec's artworks are - what? Just around, everywhere. It's fashionable to hate the Hollywood versions of great artists (Lust for Life, which I really love, is universally loathed among art snobs), but to tell you the truth, I think Ferrer comes closer to  becoming Lautrec than any other actor could, or should even try to.

I wonder what that's like. I did a lot of acting in years past, community theatre, nothing nearly as intense as this, but I do know something about the process of becoming someone else. When you look at his face, it's startling, even shocking how much he resembles the real Henri. It isn't just the black eyebrows and heavy beard, or the familiar hat and cane. His features are close enough that he carried it off in a way which, now that I look at it again, seems uncanny. 

I didn't know much about Ferrer when I first saw the movie (and I was likely about ten years old then). In the many subsequent viewings at various ages, of course, the guy kept changing, and at some point I realized Ferrer has the sexiest, most voluptuously masculine voice in history. When Elizabeth Taylor first met Richard Burton, she told a friend, "His voice gives me orgasms." I feel the same way about Jose.

Yes, he was very good-looking, but somewhat heavy-featured, with a large nose and prominent lips. A Puerto Rican, he was no doubt considered "exotic" and did not play too many romantic leads. Though it could be argued Lautrec was the most romantic role of all.

I love this poster! It's yet another example of something you're supposed to hate. But hey, what about Henri himself? He could be called the very first multi-media  artist, producing not just brilliant drawings and oil pantings, but pastels, lithographs, book covers, calendars, and other forms of mass-production which appalled the purists, and quickly made him insanely famous. Quite literally, his posters were plastered all over Paris, and became so desirable that people literally tagged along as the new posters were put up so they could peel them off the walls before the glue was set.  As one of his biographers stated, "Everything was for sale,"  a poignant statement that reveals all the ways in which he sold his own soul.

So how can anyone say he didn't capture the real Henri, the broken-hearted bon vivant? It's  tempting to put these photos side-by-side with photos of the real Henri, but I don't think I even need to. The wounded look is there, the tristesse. 

In  this one, the resemblance is even more startling, because Ferrer somehow or other captures the most elusive thing about his photos: that sense that his public face is essentially unreadable. He must have studied pictures of him to get that distanced look, with all the fathomless hurt lurking behind it.

And at work. My God, the more I look at these, having spent most of the day looking at actual photos of Lautrec, the more amazed I am. So never mind that they used trick photography to make him look

like a dwarf, or had him walking along with his shoes on his knees.

Kirk Douglas claimed that playing Van Gogh cost him dearly, and it took a very long time to shake off the torture and torment of the man (if he ever did). I don't know if Ferrer immersed himself in the same way. So now I guess I have to find some biographical material to see if I can find out. Stay tuned, there will be more. . .